News archive

The history of the Holocaust is the focus of a new exhibition and a learning center that both opened at the University of Huddersfield on September 17, 2018. The two offers came about through efforts of the HSFA (Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association) in cooperation with the northern English university. The...

The International Tracing Service (ITS) welcomes the safeguarding and funding of the European Holocaust research project EHRI. As announced in Vienna on September 11, 2018, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has put the project on its roadmap.

Luise Brand was twenty-seven years old when she was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp from Poland on August 4, 1944 – and in her sixth month of pregnancy. Three weeks later she was declared “unfit for work” and her name was entered on a list for transport to Auschwitz.

Applications for the International Winter School for Educators “Nazi Forced Labour – History and Aftermath” organized by the International Tracing Service (ITS) and the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre Berlin-Schöneweide should be received by 20th September 2018. The English-language seminar will be held in...

The International Tracing Service (ITS) will hold a training seminar for specialists from schools and other educational institutions as part of the educational program accompanying the “Expelled! Berlin 28.10.1938” exhibition at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. On September 17, 2018, Akim Jah, a research associate from...

Ellis de Vries was born on October 15, 1944, in the Theresienstadt ghetto. It was a miracle that both mother and daughter survived. Most members of the Jewish de Vries family were deported via the Westerbork transit camp directly to Auschwitz or Sobibor, where they were murdered. Helena de Vries, who was pregnant, was...

In the summer of 2018, Jean-Pierre Lopez was able to wind up his father's watch again, a square timepiece with a silver link band and a white face. “It’s extraordinary,” he wrote to the ITS, “it seems to still work perfectly after 74 years.”

Max Wernicke was committed to the Neuengamme concentration camp as a so-called police inmate. After the bombing attacks on Hamburg in the summer of 1943 and new waves of arrests, there was no longer enough space in the city prisons.

August 2 is the International Day of Remembrance of the National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma, to which some 500,000 persons persecuted as “Zigeuner” (“gypsies”) fell victim. On this day in 1944, 2,900 Sinti and Roma were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on orders from the Chief Office...

Six columns and five lines—that was all the Nazis needed to divide the people in the concentration camps into categories. One of the few surviving panels illustrating the cloth ID badges made its way to Arolsen after the war from the liberated Dachau concentration camp and is kept in the ITS archive.